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We need certain information to reproduce problems. Please include this information in your original post, at a minimum:

-Game log - located at My Documents\My Games\Unreal Tournament 3 Demo\UTGame\Logs\Launch.log
-Description of the problem, as detailled as possible
-Video card and driver version
-OS
-CPU and system memory
-If you had a spontaneous reboot, please also include the newest file in C:\WINDOWS\Minidump

Some people may be seeing hitches while playing the UT3 demo on NVIDIA GPUs in the Geforce 6 and 7 series. This can happen when a new object is rendered for the first time, e.g. when picking up a new weapon, first firing it and so on. We added an option to significantly lessen the impact of said hitches and will enable it by default for the game if it proves to be an overall win.

To enable the option in the demo:

1) Exit the game and open the Windows Explorer.
2) Open the "My Documents\My Games\Unreal Tournament 3 Demo\UTGame\Config" folder.
3) Open the UTEngine.ini file from that folder in a text editor (for example, notepad).
4) Find the [Engine.ISVHacks] section.
5) Under [Engine.ISVHacks] heading, find the line that says UseMinimalNVIDIADriverShaderOptimization=False.
6) Change that line to UseMinimalNVIDIADriverShaderOptimization=True, and save the file.

After that you should see substantially less hitching in the Unreal Tournament 3 demo.

We also recommend upgrading to the latest NVIDIA drivers (163.71 as of the time of this post), as they're always tuning them to make new games like Unreal Tournament 3 run better.

No it does not. However, you can launch a dedicated server using the menus or via the command line. The command line below configures a DM game on ShangriLa with no score limit and a time limit of 5 minutes:

DXDIAG information

DXDIAG is a diagnostic tool that comes as part of DirectX and helps gather all relevant information about your system and installed drivers. It's usually very helpful to have this information handy and we often ask for it in order to help you out further.

To gather the information, open the "run" menu and enter "dxdiag". After it finishes starting up there should be a "save all information" button you can use to convert the information into text format you can then cut & paste into posts.

WinXP 64 installer workaround

1) Click on Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools -> Local Security Policy
2) Right click on Software Restriction Policies and select New Software Restriction Policies from the popup menu.
3) Left click on Software Restriction Policies, right click on Enforcement, and select Properties from the popup menu.
4) Under Apply software restriction policies to the following users: click All users except local administrators. Click the Apply and OK buttons - you should now be able to install the UT3 Demo

We are currently investigating why it doesn't run afterwards. Sorry for the inconvenience... we certainly would've liked this to be much smoother :-/

Benchmarking

Unlike the full game, the demo does not contain demo recording functionality. But not all hope is lost for benchmarking as most maps in Unreal Tournament 3 have a flyby that can be used to benchmark GPU performance of static geometry. This means there are no weapon FX and AI overhead, but at least it's something

You may want to remove the "-CaptureFPSChartInfo=1" if you want to use an external capture application. By default data is written to the Stats folder in your My Documents folder.

Additionally, you will want to modify UTEngine.ini and set bSmoothFrameRate in

[Engine.GameEngine]
bSmoothFrameRate=TRUE

from TRUE to FALSE to disable frame-rate smoothing/ limiting.

Another form of benchmarking is to run botmatches as a spectator, though the variance between runs is fairly high, so this is mostly good for broader comparisons and trending. Having said that, it does fully test your system the way that playing against bots would and also stresses the GPU via weapon effects, player models and such.

Workaround for UT3Demo not starting up on WinXP 64 and Windows Server 2003

We created a fix for the game not starting up on Windows XP 64 and Windows Server 2003 systems. This patch has not undergone the same amount of QA as the released demo so I strongly encourage to ONLY replace the UT3Demo.exe with the one from the patch if you are experiencing the "Modified executable code is not allowed" issue at startup.

UT3 detects your computer's hardware and very aggressively configures the game for performance.

If you're experiencing blurry graphics, lots of jagged edges, and your system meets or exceeds our recommended system specs, it's possible this automatic configuration is the culprit.

You can override these detected settings by going to the Advanced Video options in the UT3 demo. You can access these settings by:

- Select Settings from the Main menu
- Select Video from the Settings menu
- Select the Advanced button on the Video Settings screen

Screen Percentage: The most likely reason for an overall low visual quality. If set to 50, for instance, and UT3 was running at 1280x960, the actual image quality would be comparable to 640x480. Set the slider to 100 to force the game's resolution to the resolution your game is actually running at. In the example above, this would mean the image quality at 1280x960 would actually be 1280x960.

Texture Detail: Determines the quality of the textures applied to the world.

World Detail: Determines the complexity of the geometry used to render the world.

Please don't post questions to our private mail boxes. This defeats the purpose of having a public forum. We want everyone to be able to see your questions and the answers so that the information is shared, rather than being asked again and again.